mauritania

As I recall [1], Mauritania is the last stronghold of old-style slavery, where people legally own other people.

We crossed Mauritania when Aziz was running for presidency (the guy who overthrew the democratically elected government) and never even heard of the notion.

The V-Dem Democracy indices ranked in 2024 Iraq, Israel, Mauritania and Tunisia as the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the highest democracy scores.

Non-muslim black Africans are still being taken as slaves in Mauritania and Sudan (which is why the non-muslim south of Sudan seceded from the muslim north last year).

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s.

For example, compare Montenegro (.me), Macao (.mo), Mongolia (.mn), Malta (.mt), Madagascar (.mg), Mauritania (.mr), etc.

The Mediterranean is small but imagine if there was high-speed rail and a decent degree of social and economic integration all the way from South Africa and Mauritania up to Europe, that would make this a hugely important economic and political area and North America would look puny and useless beside it, due to being surrounded by oceans and so on.

Over the course of the next century, it was mostly privately owned, and the majority of residents were employees of plantations who were under temporary contracts and would return to Mauritania or the Seychelles after the contract was over.

It's common in theocratic governments: Afghanistan Iran Mauritania Saudi Arabia Vatican City Yemen and there are a number of current USofA admin supporters and personal who are Dominionists, onboard with a Christian theocracy, particularly now the war / not war / excursion is officially (by declaration of the former TV host / national guardsman in charge) a holy war supported by Jesus, Prince of Peace.

I don't very much like either this or the original title ("Twitter Hacked, Thousand of account leaked, millions compromised by Mauritania Attacker"), but there's that no-editorialised-titles rule.

This really shows just how "landlocked" [1] the People's Republic of China is by the chain of islands bordering it -- they have less ocean-facing coastline than Morocco, Portugal, and even Mauritania.

To this day, thirty years after the last country in the world (Mauritania) abolished it?

I did that too, after 10 pieces (Mauritania was one of the hardest).

The EU is so much more civilized by bribing Turkiye [0], Libya [1], Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia [2], and other nations to shoot and/or indefinitely detain them for you guys instead.